On July 19-21, the Analysis Prime team joined business and technology leaders and professionals from around the world to learn, share, innovate, and define strategies to help customers maximize their SAP finance and analytics technology investments at SAPinsider 2022 in Las Vegas. During the 4-day event, our team participated in discussions around our experience in delivering successful analytics and planning projects. Additionally, we were able to connect with the SAP Product team to learn about new innovations that will impact SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) in the remainder of 2022 into 2023. As a result, we will place strategic focus on these key trends and topics:
nearly limitless capabilities of the Business Technology Platform (BTP).
continued evolution of Extended Financial Planning (xPA) within the SAP ecosystem.
new features that will make it to SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) tenants this upcoming winter and spring.
Here is a brief recap of our experience at this year's SAPinsider event.
The robust capabilities of the SAP Business Technology Platform make it easier to extend and integrate SAP modules to fit unique business processes, enabling organizations to remain agile while delivering business outcomes. The best way to deploy BTP is to lean on its four foundational pillars: application development, integration, data and analytics, and AI. BTP provides prebuilt data models, integrations, workflows, app templates, and AI business services as well as self-service data discovery in a governed environment. An intuitive, modern environment provides development tools for various levels of proficiency with low and no code development tools for business users like AppGyver and sophisticated and powerful developer tools like SAP Business Application Studio. By using the prebuilt content, integration, and development tools, clients can for example include processes and workflows in SuccessFactors that require planning data from SAP Analytics Cloud or create a mobile application that integrates cash information from S4 HANA with various bank accounts in real-time.
The integration of SuccessFactors and SAC plan data is an example of the Extended Financial Planning capabilities within the SAP ecosystem. Extended Financial planning connects the various enterprise planning process like strategic planning, operational budgeting, demand, and headcount planning into a single integrated process that will allow companies to make decisions quicker and analyze various business scenarios with more confidence. The extension of SuccessFactors functionality in some cases requires the use of development tools from BTP but SAP also offers prebuilt content for operational headcount planning that will jump-start an implementation. There is also content available for Sales planning and integrated financial planning.
SAP Analytics cloud (SAC) is a key component within BTP as well as a strategic part of SAP’s vision of Extended Financial planning. The cloud-based planning application will see a host of updates in Q4 2022 and Q1 2024. Some of these changes include enhanced predictive planning using Smart Predict, use of Multi-action to grab a predictive scenario to populate forecast, expanded use of data analyzer that now allows connections to BW Live and HANA Live sources, a new Open API data export interface, and a new administration cockpit. The two most significant changes that we are excited about are, the tighter integration of Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC) with SAC and the redesign story editor that SAP calls Story 2.0. The DWC integration is a game changer because it will allow planning on live data from DWC as well as DWC will provide more powerful ETL capabilities. As for Story 2.0, the new layout will combine the functionality of the standard story designer, analytical application designer, and digital boardroom so a single interface will facilitate the development and maintenance of stories.
The event was packed with educational, informative, and networking sessions that enabled us to provide feedback to prospective clients and SAP as well as relay valuable product information to our existing customers, ensuring customer success throughout their product lifecycle. With new information in hand, Analysis Prime was able to tailor our support and training resources to ensure customers are prepared for upcoming SAC updates and utilize their solution to its maximum potential.
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